I’m honestly surprised at how rarely I’ve mentioned CNN on this site before. After all, from the earliest days of this site’s history I’ve spoken out against the corrosive, cultural poison that is the mainstream media, and it just so happens that the one news outlet that represents all aspects of the sickness of the media, and it’s name is CNN. Since 2015, they’ve been waging an unceasing smear campaign against Donald Trump, and have long been cheerleaders for Hillary Clinton. They tried to paint Trump as the next Hitler, and painted all his supporters as uncaring bigots. Then when he won the Presidency, they tried to delegitimise him by spreading the phony Russian collusion conspiracy, which even CNN’s own staff will admit is bullshit.

Then, after it became clear as day that the Russian collusion nonsense was finished, CNN somehow managed to sink even lower than they ever have before. A few days ago, Donald Trump tweeted out a meme showing himself wrestling Vince McMahon with the CNN logo superimposed on his face. Surprisingly it’s one of those memes that you can interpret however you want. I think that it might be symbolic of Trump winning against the media’s smear campaign, especially in light of the Russia narrative’s collapse. How did CNN react? They tried to paint it as an incitement of violence against the media. Yes, in the world of CNN, memes are now officially violence, and journalists are supposedly now in danger of losing their lives because the President shared a meme that, by the way, he didn’t make. This is all quite rich coming from the company that hired Kathy Griffin, and the same media establishment that constantly tells people that under Donald Trump you or your loved ones could die because he’s supposedly an unhinged crazy dictator.

They have been fermenting a climate of political violence against right-wingers since Trump got elected, and yet they have the nerve to proclaim that the President sharing a meme is an incitement of violence. But that’s not the worst. Apparently CNN got so offended by the meme that they had one of their muckrackers track down its creator, one “HanAssholeSolo”, and apparently managed to coerce him into an apology, with the implication that they might doxx him if they think he’s out of line. Forget the term Clinton News Network, they’ve officially become the Criminal News Network. In case they didn’t know, threatening to expose a private citizen’s personal details is a crime, and they may well have broken the law in the state in which they are headquartered.

So there you have it. CNN have officially become the Cosa Nostra of the American media, except the actual mafia would probably be punished. Not even Buzzfeed, the rag that published the so-called “piss dossier”, has stooped this low. As far as I know, no other news outlet in America is willing to operate so far outside the law just to bandage their petty ego because they were offended. CNN has long been a symbol of everything wrong with the mainstream news media, but now it has transcended mere propaganda-pushing, showing that they’re the sort of people who will intimidate critics into silence.

That being said, the professional doxxer CNN hired may as well be cut from the same cloth as Buzzfeed. In fact, he used to work for them. The doxxer, Andrew Kaczynski, has a sordid history of muckraking and yellow journalism. In 2013, Kaczynski shared false information from Reddit regarding the identity of the Boston Marathon bombers, naming Mike Mulugeta and Sunil Tripathi – two innocent men – as the suspected bombers. The actual culprits were Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, but before the actual suspects were named, Kaczynski’s false reporting led to Sunil Tripathi’s family being bombarded with calls and messages, leading Tripathi himself to commit suicide.

Later in the same year, he retweeted a stupid tweet from a PR woman named Justine Sacco (in which she made a bad joke about AIDS being white), declaring it to be “the worst tweet of all time”. Soon after that, the media elite went about destroying her reputation, and the incident may well have destroyed her professional career. Kaczynski’s career as a whole is based on digging up old footage (often of politicians) and using it as part of smear campaigns against his targets. He is the very definition of a muckraker, and yet he is rewarded for this behaviour by the journalistic community, to the pointed that he was nominated for the Shorty Awards’ “Best Journalist” award. I’m sure Joseph Pulitzer himself would be proud.

In a way, the whole fiasco shows just how rotten the journalism industry has become, and the core of it all is CNN, a network that has gone a step further than everyone else in the mainstream media, proving that there is nothing they won’t do in order to stay relevant in an era where the mainstream media is dying. If that’s not enough, they’re also completely incompetent at what they do, and I say this mainly because it turns out that “HanAssholeSolo” may not even be the original creator of the meme. It seems to me that everything CNN does in order to try and get at Donald Trump is destined to fail miserably, and that’s because CNN, and indeed the news media at large, simply doesn’t understand what’s going on. They never did, but they can’t just accept their obsolescence peaceably, and I think it’s too late for them.

Given that CNN is willing to associate with some of the scummiest people on Earth, and silence private citizens that offend them, nothing can redeem them now. I can expect a few people to use the “muh freedom of the press” argument to defend CNN, but of course that’s nonsense. The right to freedom of the press only guarantees that you can print whatever you like, as long as it doesn’t constitute slander or personal details. The “free press” defence is wholly inadequate because, and I can’t make this any clearer, CNN broke the law. It’s just like how Gawker broke the law, and yet free press fundamentalists came to their defence because somehow they had “the right” to invade Hulk Hogan’s private life. I ask, does CNN have the right to threaten a private citizen because they are a news agency? No, they don’t, but they did so anyway, and that makes them criminals.

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When Philo Farnsworth invented the television, he may not have realized the full significance of what he was doing. Of course, Farnsworth was something of an idealist, believing his invention could change the world for the better, when in fact, TV has only made things worse. He thought that television could be used to educate the world, but in reality, it had the exact opposite effect. It was used to warp the minds of the masses, and nowhere is this more apparent than on broadcast news.

Making you more comfortable with lies since 1954.

I’m aware that broadcast news is supposed to deliver information to TV viewers, which happens to be a good majority of the population. Unfortunately, as TV news became more prominent in our daily lives, many of us have grown dependent on it, and thus the corporations that run news outlet are able to exploit this dependence by spoon-feeding them lies that they present as facts.

Think of the society’s addiction to TV news as like an addiction to drugs. It doesn’t seem like it’s bad for you when you’re addicted, but it is, and when people have too much of this, they grow dependent on it, and the suppliers exploit this dependence. In this case, when the news outlets realize that so many people watch them, they know they can get their viewers to believe anything as long as they present it as an objective fact. These lies, when presented as facts, have the power to sway public opinion, and through that, they have the power to change the social climate.

Society’s dependence on outlets like BBC News, Sky News, and CNN for information have also made it easier for most of us to fall in line, and that also means making it more comfortable for the masses to embrace ignorance. This is perhaps the true reason for society getting dumber over the years.

I think that if we are ever going to change the world, then we first need to be aware of the fact that we’re being influenced by a bunch of mass media conglomerates competing for your attention and brain cells. After that, we need to be think about whether our perceptions of the world are truly are own, or if they’ve been implanted into us by media brainwashing.

The reason that the news is still able to brainwash the majority of people is that the people pay attention to them. The obvious solution, therefore, is to simply treat them as background noise (which is one of many reasons why I refer to Sky News as “Sky Noise”). This is important because if information is so valuable to us, we should also care about where we’re getting it from. If you profess to have a lot of knowledge, it is meaningless if got that knowledge from a house of lies, especially if that house of lies distorts your mind into always thinking that what you’re hearing is true. In a nutshell, that’s how I feel about broadcast news.

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Even though I know absolutely nothing about parenting, given my childhood experiences, I think there’s one piece of advice I should give – never let your kids watch the news. I say this because, unlike the countless other things parents accuse of corrupting children, letting your kids watch the news can do real damage a child’s mind. I should know this because when I was a kid, some of my perceptions of the world came from the news, which is a dreadful shame because the news is basically the pulpit of liars in suits.

Because in this business, lying can earn you fancy clothes and a paycheck.

When I was a kid, the news was flooded was stories of war in the Middle East, terrorists on the loose, kids getting killed on the streets, and of course, the seemingly neverending global warming crisis. That’s the kind of junk that can really mess up your child’s fragile little mind, and yet parents somehow think it’s okay to expose their kids to this crap. How is it that parents complain about sex, cartoon violence, rap music, violent video games (which they bought for their kids in the first place), and the Internet, but they think it’s okay to tell kids about Jesus’ violent, agonizing torture, or let them hear some false prophets tell them about how the world is going to hell.

I think the news media has more potential to warp a child’s mind than a cartoon, not just because kids are largely unaware of how the adult world works, but also because news reporters have the power to trick you into thinking that what they say is always true. As soon as you assume their words to be true, you leave yourself vulnerable to their mass-produced deception. It’s bad enough for adults, but try imagining your kids exposed to this?

No good parent would want this for their kids.

If you want your kids to turn out okay, don’t let them watch the news. Come to think of it, why would anyone watch the news in this day and age? It’s basically just a bunch of scripted, overdramatic sermons in the guise of information. I’d rather let my kids watch “Basic Instinct” than the news. It’s a way for the media to brainwash people into being vulnerable to deception. The only way I managed to avoid being brainwashed myself is because I know this is going on. A trick doesn’t work on you if you know it’s a trick.

With that in mind, I have a solution to this problem. All parents need to do is teach kids not to believe everything they see on TV, because every news reporter has his/her own agenda, and you may not even know what it is until it’s too late.

One thing that I got tired of was TV news. Think about it. It’s basically depressing to watch, and no matter what they do to try and change it, it’s mind-numbing trash that continues to perpetuate the idea that humans can’t think for themselves.

Note that I’m only talking about TV news. Maybe someday I’ll focusing on journalism as a whole, but still. I want to give you five reasons why TV news is not only a waste of time, but actually harmful to journalism.

1. It presents a bleak view of the world

One thing I learned about TV news is that it’s about making everyone feel bad. You’d be lucky to find anything good on the news, because on TV, the news relies on sensationalism and “shocking images” to draw people in.

Day in and day out, the news bombards us with wild stories of kidnappings, murders, violence, greed, and those nasty politicians we all hate. This is the world that news reporters occupy themselves with, but it’s not the world as it is.

The world is not all killers, rapists and evil people, but the news media would like you to think that is because it keeps you watching, and more importantly, it keeps you afraid of the world, and it also turns people against each other.

2. It teaches us to hate everything around us, including ourselves

Like reality TV, the news tends to make you angry about things that otherwise wouldn’t be important to you. The news ignores everything good about the world in favour of all things bad, and that makes people angry.

News stories have the power to make people hate anyone mentioned in them, unless that report makes them look good. And of course, since politics is nothing but opinion, the news can also get people talking about politics, but in such a manner that the ugliness of politics plays out in your own life, as in you find yourself arguing with good friends over an arbitrary subject that shouldn’t matter to you.

The last thing the world needs is more hatred caused by the news media, especially if it clouds your mind.

3. It actually makes you dumber

To most people, the news is meant to inform you and increase your knowledge, but they’re wrong. It makes you dumber because it inhibits your thinking powers. Thinking requires concentration, which requires uninterrupted time. The news is designed to interrupt that.

Also, the news actually has no explanatory power. What TV news reporters actually do is condense the world around them into small factoids in order to fit all the stories into a half hour. That’s not enough for you to learn anything.

The news also makes you dumber by twisting your perception of what’s dangerous and what isn’t. For example, the media throws the word “terrorism” around all the time, when in actually, almost no one in West has been killed by terrorism since 9/11. In the UK, no one has been killed by terrorism since 7/7.

The problem is that our brains are still stuck in the stone age, which means that when most of us see something bad happening, and we’re told it’s real, then we see it as a real danger, regardless of the likelihood of it actually happening.

4. Anyone on the news could have their own agenda

We all know about Fox News and their blatantly biased agenda, but just because they’re biased, doesn’t mean everyone else isn’t. My mom often told me that every reporter has their own bias. If I had been willing to investigate the meaning behind that phrase when I was 17, I would have found out that every TV news reporter is basically a sham.

Rather than simply reporting the facts, every news reporter tries to add their own bias and drama into the mix. What’s worse is that some TV news reporters can fool you into thinking their unbiased, when they may actually be biased themselves. What the newsmen try to do is sway you towards a way of thinking, and there’s nothing they won’t do in order to make sure that happens.

In the UK, most of our news outlets are populist, that means that espouse whatever beliefs are popular at the moment. Wherever you are, the news stations will never go broke appealing to the lowest common denominator. Unfortunately, this has led to age where we are hopelessly divided over petty politics, especially in America.

5. It’s just a waste of time

No matter what you believe, watching TV wastes more time than anything else you do. All you in this case is sit your ass in front the TV and watch random images unfold, while your mind erodes away.

In 30 minutes, you could have done anything. You could try your hand at writing a screenplay, go out for dinner if you had the money, or spend time with loved ones.

Besides, out of the tens of thousands of news stories you may have seen, did any one of them cause you to make decisions that improve your quality of life? If not, then maybe that’s because the news makes your life feel worse without actually having an effect.

Also, you can get what amounts to the same information by asking someone, or by looking on the Internet, so TV news should be extinct someday soon.

Conclusion

I’m not against journalism. After all, we need it. But journalism shouldn’t be about eroding people’s minds until we’re all passive slobs. It should be about questioning the status quo, expanding people’s minds, and exposing abuse of power. That’s what was back in the 70’s, but a lot has changed now.

Once we’re aware of the damage the news can do to our minds, and of how pointless it is, maybe we can evolve past it, and a whole new age of free thought may emerge.

You’re probably thinking, how is this relevant to the UK? Simple. Fox News is available on Sky (channel 509). I’m more shocked that people are unaware, and that Ofcom hasn’t wised up to Fox News’ blatant bias.

Anyhow, when I was 16, I wanted to look for a channel that was completely American. Complete with American personalities and American ads (which I couldn’t find). Eventually, I tuned out of Fox News, primarily because I had no idea what they were talking about, until I did some research, and found out that Fox News is biased to the right, and that its reporters personally try and take down anyone who opposes the Republican agenda.

I felt like it was a massive con. The only all-American channel I can find on Sky is apparently the most evil news outlet there is. I ended up becoming obsessed with media bias, to the point that I based my second art project in sixth form on the issue of bias in Fox News. I named it “The False News Channel Project”.

In 2011, I periodically put Fox News on so I could personally investigate right wing bias myself. I did just that during my trip to New York (taking full advantage of the fact that we were out most of the time). What I found was less than rosy. I found that Fox commentators were vilifying British union protesters and calling Israel the most peaceful and democratic part of the Middle East (when Jerusalem is riddled with sectarian violence).

Back then, I hated Fox News because they were supporting the things I came to passionately oppose:

Censorship

Corporate greed

Monopolies

Fundamentalist Christianity

Republican dominance

Invasions of foreign countries

Media bias

As I grew older, my opinions matured, but I still passionately Fox News, for all the same reasons. They’re an evil media corporation that seeks to brainwash its viewers with right-wing propaganda, and it doesn’t respect the people’s right to make up their own minds.

But now, I realize, that there’s an even bigger reason to hate Fox News. It almost gave me a negative view of America. It almost made me forget how much more wonderful America is beyond the political rhetoric, probably because I was an overly naive teenager with too much of a concern for the world at large.

However, my raw dripping negativity towards Fox News remains, just that it isn’t guided by a liberal’s sense of outrage. It’s guided mainly by Fox News’ objective track record of grievous crimes against journalism.

I don’t really look for more recent examples of bias in Fox News because I know that it will all be the same, even if Glenn Beck (who I despise with a passion) is no longer a part of it. I don’t need to be told that Fox News is evil, I know it is. I’ve seen it for myself, and decided for myself that it was.